From: "Chas. Owens" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> 2008/4/3 Jay Savage <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
> snip
> >  Exactly. The functionality is there to be taken advantage of. I don't
> >  see why that is "unfortunate" at all. How is "Mongolian digit three"
> >  less of a digit than arabic numeral three? That \d is unicode-aware
> >  is, IMO, it's strongest selling point over a simple roll-your-own
> >  character class. \d finds digits; [0-9] finds arabic numerals.
> >
> >  As for what one expects...that's a different story.
> snip
> 
> Well, that depends on what you want to do with the data.  Generally, I
> pull a number out of a string because I want to do math with it, but
> Perl only does math with characters "0" .. "9", other characters get
> turned into 0.  This has made \d next to useless for me as I am
> looking for a number and it can return a string.  The other problem is
> that for years people have been saying "don't use [0-9], use \d
> instead", so now we have to say just as loudly and often "Only use \d
> if you mean any UNICODE character that is marked as a digit and use
> [0-9] when you want to do math on the result" (which is what I am
> doing).

Well said, I agree completely. If I ever wanted all Unicode 
characters that are kinda-...-well-...-numbers-...-at-least-for-
someone, I would happily use \p{IsDigit}. Changing the behaviour of 
\d+ from "a number I can do math with" to "something that when 
printed someone might know is a number" was ... not a good idea.

We can only hope that the use of the non-arabic digits will be very 
very rare.

Jenda
===== [EMAIL PROTECTED] === http://Jenda.Krynicky.cz =====
When it comes to wine, women and song, wizards are allowed 
to get drunk and croon as much as they like.
        -- Terry Pratchett in Sourcery


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